Ask HN: Hacking a video wall.

1 pointsMalphasWats13y ago2 comments

Hi,

I'm working on a project to convert the use of a 9-screen video wall into an information point. We have a spare one at the school I teach in and I've commandeered it for my own propaganda :)

I plan to use 9 raspberry pis (which I already have laying around), one to run each of the 9 screens in the array.

Initially I was thinking of using Synergy to share the keyboard and mouse of a control laptop in order to configure the screens and change the content as required, but it seemed inelegant and I wondered if anyone had any experience with doing something similar - it strikes me as the sort of thing that might have some development done already but I didn't know where to start.

I'd like to be able to do different thing with them over time - show different mixtures of slideshows, webpages, videos and other applications. Eventually, I'd like to include some cool interactive things using cameras and maybe a kinect or something.

2 comments

andor13y ago

You should take a look at info-beamer. It supports displaying video via FFMPEG, you could show browser content via VNC, and the best thing is that you can hot-swap the animation code while it is running. It's a bit like Processing, but much more lightweight.

Out of the box it doesn't solve your array problem, but maybe you can hack something up. For example, you could have a huge virtual display on your control laptop, and show parts of it on the Raspberry Pi's via VNC. Or you could have a "crop" parameter in all your animations, so that every Pi can render a different part (required perfect timing, though).

http://info-beamer.org/

MalphasWatsOP13y ago

This looks interesting, thanks.

At the moment I don't want to use it as a single display, rather display 9 different things (and various permutations thereof).

I plan to hack something together, but I'm struggling to envision how it should all look, so this is a good start.

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